Five things: Tips on humour

By E.B. | NEW YORK

IF ONLY there was an easy recipe for funniness. Personal jokes that seem perfectly hilarious in the indulgent hush of one's own bedroom sometimes (often) fall flat (splat) the moment an actual audience (mom) is introduced. What to do? The answer for most of us is to simply avoid the matter. Stop trying. Comedy is not really a field in which practice makes perfect. But perhaps there are some handy rules to follow for the more intrepid (dumb) among us.

Scott Adams, the creator of "Dilbert", a fantastically successful comic strip about office life (that happens to be only marginally less dreary than actual office life), has written up a few tips on "How to Write Like a Cartoonist" for the Wall Street Journal. (Perhaps the next instalment of this nascent series will be "How to report the news while being published by a cartoon".) So as part of our "Five things" series, we hereby submit five of Mr Adams's gems on humour writing.

On danger:
"Humour likes danger. If you are cautious by nature, writing humour probably isn't for you. Humour works best when you sense that the writer is putting himself in jeopardy."

On people:
"Humour is about people. It's impossible to write humour about a concept or an object. All humour involves how people think and act. Sometimes you can finesse that limitation by having your characters think and act in selfish, stupid or potentially harmful ways around the concept or object that you want your reader to focus on."

On readers:
"Let the reader do some work. Humour works best when the reader has to connect some dots."

On animals:
"Animals are funny. It's a cheap trick, but animal analogies are generally funny. It was funnier that I said, 'my cheeks went all chipmunk-like' than if I had said my cheeks puffed out."

On endings:
"A simple and classic way to end humorous writing is with a call-back. That means making a clever association to something especially humorous and notable from the body of your work"